Katana is a PHP static site & blog generator with markdown support. Using it you can deploy with Github pages or your own hosting environment.
What I like is that it utilizes Blade to build the templates and files instead of straight markdown and YAML frontmatter. Here is an example of a blog post:
@extends('_includes.blog_post_base')
@section('post::title', 'My Title')
@section('post::date', 'March 9, 2016')
@section('post::brief', 'My subtitle goes here')
@section('pageTitle')- @yield('post::title')@stop
@section('post_body')
@markdown
This is my body content
> With a blockquote
@endmarkdown
@stop
I think the only downside is if you rely on your editors markdown syntax features. But I’m sure you could get around that by having the body in it’s own file and using a Blade @include.
